*NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees All Recall Obsessing Over TRL Every Day to Find Out Who Was More Popular

If you were rushing home to catch TRL every day, you weren't the only one.

Members of some of the biggest boy bands of the '90s and early '00s appear in the Paramount+ documentary Larger Than Life: Reign of the Boybands, where they talk about their love (and hate) for MTV's Total Request Live.

Nick Lachey of 98 Degrees says he's tried to explain the "interactive" show, where now-wife Vanessa Lachey was once a host (or VJ), to their three kids.

"Fans felt like they had a say," he recalls. "I’ve tried to explain it to my kids, what it meant to that era of music and that generation of kids but if you were a certain age, it was must-see TV."

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The show, which had a music video countdown that was ranked based on fan votes for the day, helped fuel the feud between the different groups.

"It gave the fans a way to show you, quantify, which one was the biggest right now," *NSYNC's Lance Bass notes.

*NSYNC bandmate Chris Kirkpatrick agrees. "Every day, right when kids got home from school, there was our video on national TV and the Backstreet video and the 98 Degrees video," he recalls.

"It was like, ‘All right, who's going to be No. 1 today?’ It fueled this giant energy of competition and TRL was the gasoline."

"Every video we put out was No. 1 or No. 2, No. 1 or No. 2. And then *NSYNC came out and you had 98 Degrees. It was just this battle," acknowledges Backstreet Boys' AJ McLean.

"If any group is telling you they didn’t want to be No. 1 on the countdown, they’re lying to you," Lachey says. "Of course you wanted to be No. 1. We took notice of where we were on the countdown every day.”

"I think TRL was definitely the nail in the coffin for the fandoms to be at each other’s throats," Bass adds, noting fans got all the way into it.

For 98 Degrees in particular, going on TRL led to "almost like an overnight change," says Jeff Timmons.

"We went from driving ourselves around in a Winnebago that we had wrapped to not being able to get out of the Winnebago. Literally fans everywhere, wherever we pulled up. Fans would sneak on our tour bus and we wouldn’t even know they were there until the next city," he says.

Hear more about the competition between boy bands and how they all rose to fame in Larger Than Life: Reign of the Boybands, now streaming on Paramount+.